IVIV (1)

[alice wellintown]

Studies in Classic American Literature
by D.H. Lawrence
CHAPTER 7
Nathaniel Hawthorne and The Scarlet Letter

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE writes romance.
The Scarlet Letter gives the show away.
You have your pure-pure young parson Dimmesdale.
You have the beautiful Puritan Hester at his feet.
And the first thing she does is to seduce him.
And the first thing he does is to be seduced.
And the second thing they do is to hug their sin in secret, and gloat
over it, and try to understand.
Which is the myth of New England.
Deerslayer refused to be seduced by Judith Hutter. At least the Sodom
apple of sin didn't fetch him
But Dimmesdale was seduced gloatingly. Oh, luscious Sin!
He was such a pure young man.
That he had to make a fool of purity.
The American psyche.
Of course, the best part of the game lay in keeping up pure appearances.
The greatest triumph a woman can have, especially an American woman,
is the triumph of seducing a man: especially if he is pure.
And he gets the greatest thrill of all, in falling. - 'Seduce me, Mrs
Hercules.'
And the pair of them share the subtlest delight in keeping up pure
appearances, when everybody knows all the while. But the power of pure
appearances is something to exult in. All America gives in to it. Look
pure!
To seduce a man. To have everybody know. To keep up appearances of
purity. Pure!
This is the great triumph of woman.
A. The Scarlet Letter. Adulteress! The great Alpha. Alpha! Adulteress!
The new Adam and Adama! American!
A. Adulteress! Stitched with gold thread, glittering upon the bosom.
The proudest insignia.
Put her upon the scaffold and worship her there. Worship her there.
The Woman, the Magna Mater. A. Adulteress! Abel!
Abel! Abel! Abel! Admirablel
It becomes a farce.
The fiery heart. A. Mary of the Bleeding Heart. Mater Adolerata! A.
Capital A. Adulteress. Glittering with gold thread. Abel! Adultery.
Admirable!
It is, perhaps, the most colossal satire ever penned. The Scarlet
Letter. And by a blue-eyed darling of a Nathaniel.
Not Bumppo, however.
The human spirit, fixed in a lie, adhering to a lie, giving itself
perpetually the lie.
All begins with A.
Adulteress. Alpha Abel, Adam. A. America.
The Scarlet Letter.
'Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have
seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien,
and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image
of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with
one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed,
but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless Motherhood,
whose infant was to redeem the world.'
Whose infant was to redeem the world indeed! It will be a startling
redemption the world will get from the American infant.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming!  Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all around it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The phrase "stony sleep" is drawn from the mythology of William Blake.
In Blake's poem, Urizen falls, unable to bear the battle in heaven he
has provoked. To ward off the fiery wrath of his vengeful brother
Eternals, he frames a rocky womb for himself: "But Urizen laid in a
stony sleep / Unorganiz'd, rent from Eternity." During this stony
sleep, Urizen goes through seven ages of creation-birth as fallen man,
until he emerges. This is the man who becomes the Sphinx of Egypt.
Urizen is the embodiment of conventional reason and law. He is usually
depicted as a bearded old man; he sometimes bears architect's tools,
to create and constrain the universe; or nets, with which he ensnares
people in webs of law and conventional culture.

Orc's first appearance in Blake's America as a chained adolescent
bursting his fetters identifies him with the American Revolution. The
story of his birth, binding, and liberation is retold in later works,
where as a fiery demon of oedipal rage and a howling voice rousing the
oppressed, he emblematizes sexual, political, religious and psychic
revolt in general.

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